With each game I'm getting faster at figuring out an idea--a week in I have a framework for what I want to do this year. My idea is that I'm making a competitive puzzle game where a bunch of items are available to select, and then you put them into your own grid, with matching pieces being cleared. I'm technically still in my sandbox rather than my game proper, but I have the basic mechanics worked out. First there's the player selecting a piece and putting it into the grid (with 3+ touching pieces of the same type (color) being cleared):

Next is a simple AI (just normal computer opponents, not LLM slop of course). You currently manually give it a piece to place, but otherwise it's all automatic. If there's no matching piece in the grid to the selected piece, the AI selects a random grid space and rotation, and tries to place the piece--if it's off the grid, it tries up to 50 more times.  If there is a matching piece, it tries to place it next to one of the pieces (technically the pieces in order they were placed at the moment) up to 50 times, then tries to place it randomly another 50 times.

With the basic mechanics implemented, I'm now at an interesting spot, as I'm not quite sure what the game around it is, as just placing pieces into a grid isn't exactly challenging. I want the Skremplets to play differently (the Goblic Endowments map well to powers), and I want both players picking from the same pool of pieces, with a conflict mechanic if they pick the same one (so if pieces are different power levels that's interesting), but I'm not sure of the exact structure.  Part of this is tied to the look and feel, which is something I massively want to upgrade this year--if you're interested in helping me let me know!

Week 2 Devlog: 

Let's start with the video:

First of all, you can see I'm starting to get assets that aren't purely placeholder in from EdwinDamen, who's helping me with some assets for this project. The three textured blocks (red, yellow, and green) are close to final, while the grids are more in-progress.  You can also see a lot of functions from the sandbox, like the basic grid structure (expanded to 12 x 6, and now with two grids on the same screen) and the preview pane (which scales the picture, and eventually will be dynamic). Other than the assets, there are three main new things in this build:

1. The neutral grid (the pieces floating in space since there's no non-fully placeholder asset for that yet) that lets you grab pieces and place them in your grid. There's a lot to be solidified here, both in the grid's size (especially since I'm testing bigger pieces now) and mechanics like refilling the grid and the simultaneous picking by both players, and is going to be one of my next "big" projects.
2. Garbage that doesn't match naturally but clears when you clear pieces next to it. Right now the only way to send garbage is through that debug button, but the plan is to scale it based on the number of pieces and/or spaces you clear, possibly modified by powerups (more on that in a bit)
3. The powerup meter fills up as you clear pieces, and when full it does whatever powerup your character has. The latter isn't implemented yet, but that will likely be next--the first character will be Grymmt Dundle, since his apples seem easy to implement (just add them to the grid, treat them like garbage, and add extra to the powerup meter when they're cleared), but I have ideas for all eight OG Skremplets, and adding a new one shouldn't be that hard once I have each category of powerup implemented (ignoring assets of course). However, the powerup bar hides an annoying bug where clearing pieces sometimes adds more to the powerup bar than it "should." I have theories on what's going on, but it's extremely inconsistent, so it could just be a "crit" if I can't figure it out (thanks to wujak for that idea)

As for what's next, obviously I'll integrate new assets, and I mentioned stuff like the neutral overhaul and actually sending garbage/powerups, but the other hard thing is implementing AI. I have the basic AI code from my sandbox I can bring over, but I need to do things like picking and clearing garbage. I also eventually need to start thinking about story and other "boring" stuff like real menus. I also want to get music and/or other sounds, if anyone's interested in helping with that.

Week 3 Devlog:

We'll start with the video again, and as you can see a lot of progress has been made:

Obviously the main thing is that there are lot more final and near-final assets in the play scene--as always, thank EdwinDamen for the help. Since my last post I've actually made the battling part of this "Trash Battle," and I put out a prototype earlier this week with that working. However, since that prototype I've rearranged the neutral grid in the middle to be vertical rather than horizontal and reworked how it is refilled. There's also a short delay between when a matching piece is placed and when it disappears--I want to have a better animation at some point, but at least this explains things more. I have this build available for people to test if people are interested. However, I still have a ton to do over the next week:

• There are a couple bugs I need to iron out you may have seen. The most worrisome one is that the computer player breaks a lot sooner than it should--in the previous prototype it generally keeps placing pieces until it runs out of space for the piece it picks (which is the loss condition), but here it stops playing (you can see when it has a piece in the preview pane when I don't) and doesn't lose until it runs out of space. The other one is that it keeps adding pieces to the neutral grid way late, which causes an excess of red pieces (instead of just stopping, it seems to keep going until it fills the grid). The former will require me to dig into my AI code, while the latter is probably just fixing my populate loop.
• Cutscenes are probably my next major project. I have an intro cutscene written, and copied over some of my cutscene code from last year, but have yet to reimplement it (especially since I want a bit more flair than last year).
• More flair is a lot of what I want--obviously Edwin will get more (and more polished) assets done over the next week and a half, but ideally I want things like short animations on attacks (which not only have to get designed, I have to learn how to implement). I also want to hopefully get some sound this year--that will probably take the form of free sound assets (unless I get really ambitious and/or get help), but that's still more than last year.
• Otherwise it's just fleshing things out: more pieces, more characters (including AI types and powerups) and more possible play scenes.

Week 4 Devlog:

Another week, one more video to showcase just how far I've come, and how far I have left to go:

The main additions this time are game flow-related--the title screen looks better, the character select screen exists, and there are cutscenes now. I feel like the flow is working really, really well (and part of that is the polish, most of which comes from EdwinDamen). As for what's left in the 3 days:

• Obviously there's a lot of polish left and bugs to fix--the blank screen at the end of the video is a surprise crash, since that was the first time I tried to go to "Round 2." There are also more missing and placeholder assets--the reporter probably isn't going to be ZugTug (and certainly not one that's clipping off the screen), though things like the street background might end up getting cut (or done with my limited Paint skills)
• I still have to develop the unique parts of the end game--there are both cutscenes to write and backend support for the gameplay, and while I know most of what I want to do (no spoilers ;) ), it would just take a lot of work to put pen to paper
• On the gameplay side, I want to implement a "bag" system to make the pieces more consistent (and also reduce the clarity issues with pieces of the same type being next to one another on the conveyor belt), and I know how to do it, it just took a backseat to getting the content finished.
• Speaking of content, I have at least two more characters I know how I want to implement, but won't have fancy play scene assets from Edwin (and instead will have LKB crops in the play scene). They aren't super-important, but I want to get them done if I can
• I also want to have more AI modes, particularly with piece placement--the problem is that is hard to do (and get right), so it might get dropped as the current placement algorithm is "good enough"
• Finally, on the polish side, I want to have some kind of sound in the game--it would be free-use music and/or sound effects for certain, but I'd also need to learn how to (properly) do sound in Godot--I really want this, but it might not be practical with the little time remaining.